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Friday, May 29, 2015

Forgotten Books: Haunted Mesa - Donald Bayne Hobart

First some background: The Masked Rider was a pretty
long-running character in the Western pulps. Novels featuring him, in magazines
from two different publishers, appeared for almost twenty years. More than
likely, the character was created to cash in on the success of the Lone Ranger
on radio. He was also a masked rider of the plains (hence the name) and had a
faithful Indian companion, in this case the Yaqui known as Blue Hawk. Because
he wore a mask, folks often mistook him for an owlhoot, and he was sometimes
known as the Robin Hood Outlaw. But of course the Masked Rider was a good guy,
using that unsavory reputation at times to help him foil the schemes of the
real villains. In the early issues of the pulp published by Ranger Publications
(another nod to the Lone Ranger), he was more of a Shadow-like figure, a
mysterious, black-caped personage prone to manipulating events behind the
scenes. When the magazine became part of the Thrilling Group, the novels became
more action-oriented and less mysterious, but the basic set-up remained the
same, with the Masked Rider and Blue Hawk drifting from place to place,
righting wrongs.

One thing that made the Masked Rider different from the Lone Ranger was that he
had a secret identity of sorts. The Lone Ranger would sometimes masquerade as
other characters, but the Masked Rider spent a considerable amount of time in
each adventure posing as drifting cowpoke Wayne Morgan. Note that Wayne Morgan
wasn't his real name; that's just a fictional identity the Masked Rider made
use of. His real name and background is never revealed in the stories.

My introduction to the character came not from the pulps but rather from a
series of paperback reprints published by Curtis Books in the late Sixties and
early Seventies. Quite a few (but by no means all) of the novels from the
Thrilling Group incarnation of the pulp were reprinted. I had a bunch of them
and read quite a few of them, but it had been a long time since I'd tried one
of the Masked Rider's adventures. I have a few of them on my shelves now, and
the other day Donald Bayne Hobart's HAUNTED MESA seemed to need me to read it.

This one originally appeared in the January 1942 issue of MASKED RIDER WESTERN,
and you can see that cover here on the blog tomorrow as part of the Saturday
Morning Western Pulp series. I'm writing about the book today because I read
the paperback edition. (I don't own a copy of the pulp.) This one has a nicely
atmospheric opening as several cattlemen are about to lynch the man they
believe to be the leader of the rustlers who have been plaguing the Haunted
Mesa country. They're jumped by the rustlers and might be wiped out except for
the timely arrival of the Masked Rider and Blue Hawk, who happen to be on top
of the mesa itself. The "leader" of the rustlers gets away, but the
reader knows all along he's not the actual villain. He's been framed for the
crime by the mastermind who's really behind the gang, and the identity of that
mastermind couldn't be much more obvious if the guy was wearing a neon sign
proclaiming his evilness.

But you know what? I don't care. The real fun of a book like this is reading
about how the Masked Rider foils the various schemes of the bad guys, racing
around having gunfights and fistfights, getting captured, escaping, and generally
being the stalwart pulp hero that he was for many years. This is pure
entertainment as far as I'm concerned, comfort reading, if you will, and I
enjoyed the hell out of it.

A few words about Donald Bayne Hobart: Surely forgotten these days except by a
few pulp aficionados, not much is known about Hobart. He was born in 1898 and
started writing when he was around 20 years old, but he didn't become a
prolific pulp author until the late 1920s, when he began writing for numerous
pulps in various genres. By the late 1930s, he had settled into a niche as a
productive author of Western and detective stories, nearly all of them
appearing in pulps from the Thrilling Group published by Ned Pines and edited
by Leo Margulies. Hobart kept turning out stories until the mid-Fifties,
usually under his own name and sometimes under the rather transparent pseudonym
Hobart Donbayne. He published a few late stories in the mystery digests and
died in 1970.

Even though Hobart's name appeared frequently on the covers, I don't think
anybody ever considered him to be more than a competent, third-tier pulp
writer. I never did, although honestly I'd never read more than a few of his
stories. Based on HAUNTED MESA, though, I may have underrated him a little.
This is a nicely written yarn with good action scenes and the occasional
atmospheric touch, as I mentioned above, including a final battle on top of the
mesa during a thunderstorm. Sure, there's a lot of "yuh mangy
polecat" dialogue, but you've got to expect that. Good solid work all
around, certainly good enough to make me think I need to read more by Hobart. I
have another of his Masked Rider paperbacks on hand, as well as stories by him
in various Western pulps.

Finally, about Curtis Books: The company lasted only a few years, but during
its run it published quite a bit of good fiction, including a lot of reprints
from the Rio Kid Western pulp and a number of Mike Avallone's Ed Noon novels,
both reprints and originals. (The first Curtis Book I ever bought, off the
spinner rack at Trammell's Pak-a-Bag Grocery, was Avallone's SHOOT IT AGAIN,
SAM.) They've come to be notorious for producing some of the cheapest, most
shoddily made paperbacks of all time, however. The pages in my copy of HAUNTED
MESA are as brown as if they had come from the original pulp itself. Luckily,
they're not very brittle. And in even more of a surprise, the glue has actually
held up in this copy, so the pages didn't separate from the spine. I've seen
that happen time and time again with Curtis Books.

Copies of the Masked Rider paperback reprints can be found on-line, but they're
fairly pricey, maybe because not all that many of them survived. If you can put
yourself in that pulp mindset (I live
in that pulp mindset, most of the time), they're a lot of fun. If you run
across any of them that aren't too expensive, I think they're worth picking up
and worth reading.

Very well-researched piece! I have a few MASKED RIDER pulps around here and based on your recommendation I'll take a closer look. Every time I see one I'm irresistibly reminded of Lenny Bruce's classic "Thank You, Masked Man" routine.

DBH was also prolific writer of comic book filler stories for the Pines comics. We wrote Westerns of course and kid detective storiesxabout a kid naked Herbie Johnson. He also wrote funny animal and romance. I always find him entertaining no matter the publication.